The ration was generally eaten by the officers at a single meal, and to insure exact fairness, and to remove any ground for complaint, the mess adopted the rule that turn about should be taken in the disagreeable duty of making the daily issue. The officer of the day arranged the food in as many portions as there were persons. Then, in an order fixed by lot, each officer inspected the various piles of food and chose that which most pleased him. The officer making the division for the day took the lot left. It is to be presumed that the men suffered even more than the officers on these starvation rations. Certainly they were unable to restrain their feelings as well as did the officers, and on October 4, 1853, occurred an act doubtless unprecedented in the royal navy. Suffering from prolonged cravings of hunger, made more acute by the late reduction of food and by the severe winter cold, the ship's crew assembled on the quarterdeck in a body and asked Captain M'Clure for more food, which he refused to grant. By hunting, which duty now fell almost entirely on the officers, a few ounces of fresh meat--deer, field-mice, or even wolf--were now and then added to their meagre meals. The fortunate hunter, besides his game perquisites of head and heart, also enjoyed other privileges that almost always brought him back to the ship in a condition that made him a frightful spectacle from blood and dirt. When he killed a deer or other animal, the first act of the hunter was to put his lips to the mortal wound and take therefrom a draught of fresh, warm blood that ebbed from the dying animal. In taste and in effect this blood was found to be very like a warm uncooked egg. As water for washing was precious and rarely to be had, owing to lack of fuel, and then in small amounts, the ghastly spectacle that a man presented when the blood of an animal was glued over his face, and was frozen into the accumulated grime of weeks without washing, may be better imagined than described. The awful cold in which lived and hunted these half-starved men taxed to the utmost their impaired powers of endurance. For two days in January the temperature was ninety-one degrees below the freezing-point, and the average for that month was four degrees below that of frozen mercury. The pall of gloom and despair that had come with the winter darkness, from the frightful cold, and from increasing sickness was somewhat broken on March 15, 1853, when the weakest half of the crew was told off in parties to make the spring retreat with sledges. To put them in condition for the field M'Clure gave them full rations. It was strange to note how closely they, eating once more heartily, were watched and to what extent the few ounces of extra food made them objects of envy to their healthier and stronger comrades, who were to stay by the ship another awful winter.